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Rebecca's Blogs

  • Image of a box like character is standing mournfully with a heart tucked under their arm
    October 10, 2023 Rebecca Sharrock

    THERE ARE TIMES WHEN IT DOES HURT TO BE DIFFERENT

    In today’s day and age, a lot is being done to promote neurodiversity (or to promote acceptance of people with disabilities). We have come a reasonable distance in a very short space of time. Thus as a person who has disabilities myself, I am in truth very thankful that I wasn’t born in an earlier time. However as life for people with disabilities was exceptionally difficult a mere century ago (and nothing much was done to improve those conditions until recently), we are still a long way from living in a world that is even close to perfect.
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  • Illustration of a ladies silhouette with an outline of her brain on show. She is surrounded by clock faces and three lightbulbs to represent thinking.
    September 4, 2023 Rebecca Sharrock

    THE ONLY PROBLEM IS, THAT I NEED TO KNOW EVERYTHING IN ADVANCE…

    Since the very beginning of my life, I have always experienced anxiety about unpredictability. These episodes aren’t just mere moments of daily stress either. On the contrary, whenever an unexpected change happens my natural reaction is to completely lose control, and have intense meltdowns where I’m uncontrollably yelling as well as thrashing around on the floor. Now I have learned mindfulness exercises (of which I’ll soon discuss) that enable me to gradually pull my mind out of the terror. 
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  • a digital image that looks like a circuit board with a outline of a human head and its cortex
    August 8, 2023 Rebecca Sharrock

    I'VE HAD AN IDEA FOR QUITE SOME TIME...

    I was given a comforting (as well as exciting) idea. There was a time when I had to travel over to California, to have an MRI done by the lab researching one of the conditions that I have. My mother did of course have to come along with me, and we spent just over a week there. In addition to having my MRI that week, I also got to meet and talk to the famous robot Asimo. Asimo certainly was extremely technologically advanced for his time. He amazed crowds with these qualities; though I discovered that his primary purpose was to assist people with disabilities as well. That is when I received the idea of eventually having a robot of my own to both help me and keep me company.
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  • Image of a person painting a mindfulness picture at table
    July 6, 2023 Rebecca Sharrock

    DOING ARTWORK IS BRINGING MINDFULNESS TO LIFE

    The first thing that comes to mind when many of us think of mindfulness, is that it solely involves meditation and/or breathing exercises. Yet despite many being available that do involve meditation, there are also other ways of practising mindfulness. Doing artwork is one example. In truth activities which could be termed as artwork are vast. But the reason why visual art (that of which is intended to be aesthetic to someone by sight or purely and simply seeing) is mentioned in the following paragraph is merely because it’s an activity which I myself do.
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  • Blue sky with clouds and planes wing. View from planes window
    June 8, 2023 Rebecca Sharrock

    DISORDERS, TRAVEL AND PLEASURE

    Recently a documentary film about me and my family (named Because We Have Each Other) has been released to the world, and in April/May of 2023 we travelled to Toronto for our screening at the HotDocs International Film Festival. As we live in Brisbane this was my longest journey since the “pre-pandemic days”. In fact the last time I visited a destination that far away was when we travelled to Florida in 2011. We’ve visited California countless times, yet the North American east coast is another six or seven hours of flying from there.
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  • people walking around a large maze
    February 7, 2023 Rebecca Sharrock

    A WORLD WITH FACIAL EXPRESSIONS IS ALIEN TO ME

    From my personal perspective, everybody has different genetic appearances. No two sets of eyes, mouths or any other physical features look 100% the same. This is even the case with siblings who are monozygotic. So, therefore, identifying facial expressions is just as difficult a task for me as choosing a grain of sand, and then trying to identify that after it has been randomly mixed amongst billions of others in a box is.

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